Walter Jackson Freeman, Father of the Lobotomy

For many, the word lobotomy conjures up images of an operation performed indiscriminately using crude instruments, leaving patients drooling vegetables. You may have even heard tales of a mad doctor traversing the country offering the procedure from his four-wheeled “Lobotomobile.” That story, of course, is a mix of fact and fiction—one that befits the eccentric creator of the procedure, Walter Jackson Freeman II.

Despite his grim legacy today, Freeman came from a family long respected for its work in the healing profession. His father was a noted otolaryngologist, and his maternal grandfather was a Civil War surgeon who went on to treat six U.S. presidents, including then-future president Franklin Roosevelt in the early years of his paralysis from polio.

Freeman’s academic career was promising, too. Graduating from Yale in 1916, he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania to study medicine, earning his degree and completing an internship there before traveling to Europe to study neurology. Upon return, he took a position as laboratories director at Saint Elizabeths Hospital, a prominent Washington, D.C. psychiatric facility.

Freeman was deeply affected by the troubling conditions he witnessed at Saint Elizabeths. Before the appearance of Thorazine and other effective psychiatric drugs in the mid-1950s, mental hospitals were often massively overcrowded, and many patients were held for decades on end. In Freeman’s native Philadelphia, for instance, the state hospital was known to house roughly 75 percent more patients than its approved capacity. In 1948, writer Albert Deutsch described a visit to the hospital that reminded him “of the pictures of the Nazi concentration camps,” describing rooms “swarming with naked humans herded like cattle and treated with less concern.”

While at St. Elizabeths, Freeman came to dismiss the reigning psychoanalytic approach—in which mental illnesses were seen as arising from the unconscious—as particularly useless in institutional settings. He believed that mental disorders had a well-defined physical cause, and increasingly embraced the idea of psychosurgery (brain surgery as a means of psychological treatment). His research in the field led him to the work of Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, who in 1935 found some success relieving mental maladies with the leucotomy, a procedure in which neural connections were severed by coring out tissues of the prefrontal cortex. Freeman was so impressed by this procedure that in 1944 he nominated Moniz for the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to the Portuguese neurologist five years later.

Because Freeman’s background was that of a neurologist rather than a surgeon, he enlisted the help of a neurosurgeon named James Watts to modify Moniz’s technique, which he renamed “lobotomy.” (The extent to which Freeman modified Moniz's procedure—which the latter had continued to refine—versus adopting it wholesale is a matter of debate.)

Freeman and Watts would perform their first lobotomy in September 1936 on a Kansas housewife named Alice Hood Hammatt. The results were encouraging: Although she had previously been diagnosed with "agitated depression" and was prone to laughing and weeping hysterically, she awoke from the operation with a "placid expression," according to her doctors, and was soon unable to remember what had made her so upset. Hammatt's husband, who later wrote to Freeman to thank him, called his wife’s post-surgery years “the happiest of her life.”

By 1942, Freeman and Watts had performed the surgery on over 200 patients (reporting improvement in 63 percent of them), and the practice had been taken up by other surgeons. Freeman reportedly felt that the lobotomy was “only a little more dangerous than an operation to remove an infected tooth.” But he still hoped for a procedure that could be more readily available to the thousands of patients languishing in mental hospitals—one that would be faster, more effective, and require fewer resources and specialized tools.

After learning of an Italian doctor who used the eye socket to access the brain, Freeman developed his transorbital lobotomy. This "improved" technique involved an instrument that slid neatly between a patient’s eyeball and the bony orbit housing it in the skull. The pick was then hammered through the bone and wiggled about with the goal of severing neural fibers connecting the frontal lobes and thalamus. The process was then repeated through the opposite eye. Sometimes called the "ice pick" lobotomy, early surgeries actually used an ice pick from Freeman's kitchen.

While the prefrontal lobotomy required over an hour of the surgeon’s time, this new procedure could be completed in 10 minutes. No drilling into the skull or dressing of post-surgery wounds was required. Freeman hoped that institutional psychiatrists, untrained in surgery, would one day be able to perform the procedure.

Like the prefrontal lobotomy, early surgeries seemed to be a success. The operation was first performed in 1946, on a housewife named Sallie Ellen Ionesco. Angelene Forester, her daughter, remembers her mother as “absolutely violently suicidal” before the surgery. After Freeman’s hammering and probing, “It stopped immediately. It was just peace.”

Under the slogan "Lobotomy gets them home," Freeman began touring the country promoting his startling new ideas. His crusade was aided by his cocky, larger-than-life persona. Watts later recalled to the Washington Post that when lecturing, Freeman was “almost a ham actor,” so entertaining that "people would bring their dates to the clinic to hear him lecture." Freeman’s fanatic advocacy of the lobotomy, however, eventually became too much for Watts, leading to a parting of ways in 1950. "Any procedure involving the cutting of the brain tissue is a major operation and should remain in the hands of the neurological surgeon,” Watts later wrote. He explained to the Post: "I just didn't think somebody could [spend] a week with us and go home and do lobotomies."

Everything Freeman did was geared toward economy, speed, and publicity. In 1952 he performed 228 lobotomies in a two-week period for state hospitals of West Virginia; charging a mere $25 per operation, he worked without surgical mask or gloves. During marathon surgery sessions, he would often talk to journalists he’d invited in to promote his crusade, occasionally showboating with a “two-handed” technique, hammering picks into both eye sockets simultaneously. In 1951, one patient in an Iowa hospital died during the procedure when Freeman allowed himself to be distracted by a photo op for the press.

Freeman advocated the transorbital lobotomy for a broad spectrum of patients, including children as young as seven. But with the reduction of unwanted symptoms could come a tragic deadening of all emotion. A shocking number of those who received the procedure were left utterly debilitated and unable to care for themselves. This had been true of the prefrontal lobotomy, too: Notably debilitated patients included Rosemary Kennedy, sister of the late president, as well as Rose Williams, sister of playwright Tennessee Williams. Of the approximately 3500 lobotomies Freeman performed himself, 490 resulted in fatalities.

In 1967, after a patient succumbed to cerebral hemorrhage during surgery, Freeman decided to stop performing lobotomies. But he did not give up his advocacy, taking to the road in a camper van (which later writers dubbed the "Lobotomobile") to visit former patients and document his successes. (Although popular myth has Freeman performing the surgeries from his van, that was never the case.)

By then, the medical community had little use for Freeman’s triumphalism. In the mid-1950s, a new generation of more effective psychiatric medications had started sidelining Freeman’s efforts, and the very notion of psychosurgery increasingly carried a stigma. By 1950, the lobotomy had been outlawed in the Soviet Union, with Germany and Japan soon following suit. In the U.S. today, the procedure as performed by Freeman is extinct, if not technically illegal. However, some scholars note that Freeman's work paved the way for forms of neurosurgery still used in cases of severe psychiatric illness, as well as procedures such as deep brain stimulation, used to treat neurological conditions like Parkinson's.

Walter Freeman died of cancer in 1972 at the age of 76. Despite the dark associations that remain around the operation he pioneered, he believed himself a humanitarian pioneer until the very end.

Grace O'Malley, the Fearless 16th-Century Irish Pirate Queen Who Stood Up to the English

If asked to name a pirate from history, many people will mention Blackbeard or Captain William Kidd. If pressed to name a female pirate, they might mention Anne Bonny, who terrorized the Caribbean alongside Captain "Calico" Jack Rackham in the early 18th century. Anne Bonny, however, was far from the only female pirate to terrorize the seas. More than a century before Bonny's birth, another woman ruled the waves, debated with Queen Elizabeth I, and sat at the head of a prosperous pirate empire. She was Grace O'Malley, Pirate Queen.

Grace With the Cropped Hair

Known in Gaelic as Gráinne Ní Mháille, Grace was born in Ireland sometime around 1530. She was the daughter of Eoghan Dubhdara Ó Máille, ruler of the territory of Umhall and the lord of an ancient, powerful dynasty in the province of Connaught. The Ó Máille family's money came from the seas, raised in the form of taxes levied on anyone who fished off their stretch of the Irish coast. The family were also shrewd traders and merchants, trading (and sometimes plundering) as far away as Spain. Ó Máille castles also dominated the southwest coastline of County Mayo, providing protection from invasion for the wealthy lord's territory. At a time when the Tudors in England were ramping up their conquest of Ireland, such defensive measures were vital.

The folklore of Grace O'Malley begins in her childhood, when she supposedly begged her father to let her join him on a trade mission to Spain. When he refused his daughter's request on the grounds that her long hair would be hazardous on the rolling deck of a ship, she hacked off her mane, earning herself the nickname Gráinne Mhaol, or "Grace with cropped hair."

Though little is known of Grace's early life, when she was about 16 she made a political marriage to Dónal Ó Flaithbheartaigh, heir to the lands of Ó Flaithbheartaigh. It was an excellent dynastic match, but despite bearing her husband three children, Grace wasn't made for housewifery. She had more ambitious plans.

Soon Grace was the driving force in the marriage, masterminding a trading network to Spain and Portugal and leading raids on the vessels that dared to sail close to her shores. When her husband was killed in an ambush by a rival clan around 1565, Grace retreated to Clare Island, and established a base of operations with a band of followers. According to legend, she also fell in love with a shipwrecked sailor—and for a time life was happy. But when her lover was murdered by a member of the neighboring MacMahon family, Grace led a brutal assault on the MacMahon castle at Doona and slaughtered his killers. Her actions earned her infamy as the Pirate Queen of Connaught.

Though Grace remarried for the sake of expanding her political clout, she wasn't about to become a dutiful wife. Within a year she was divorced, though pregnant, and living at Rockfleet Castle, which she'd gained in the marriage and which became her center of operations. According to legend, the day after giving birth to to her ex-husband’s son aboard a ship, she leapt from her bed and vanquished attacking corsairs

Grace continued to lead raiding parties from the coast and seized English vessels and their cargo, all of which did little to endear her to the Tudors. She was known for her aggression in battle, and it's said that when her sons appeared to be shirking, she shamed them into action with a cry of "An ag iarraidh dul i bhfolach ar mo thóin atá tú, an áit a dtáinig tú as?"—which roughly translates as "Are you trying to hide in my arse, where you came out of?"

In 1574 an English expedition sailed for Ireland with the aim of putting an end to her exploits once and for all. Though they besieged Rockfleet Castle, no one knew the coastline better than Grace, and she repulsed them with the might of her own ships.

But Grace made history in 1593 after her son was captured by Sir Richard Bingham, the English governor of Connaught. Appointed in 1584, Bingham had taken office as part of English efforts to tighten their hold on Ireland, and in 1586 his men had been responsible for the death of one of Grace's sons. Bingham also took cattle and land from Grace, which only served to increase her thirst for revenge. Yet she was a politician as much as a warrior, and knew that she couldn't hope to beat Bingham and the forces of the English government single-handedly.

Instead, she took the diplomatic route and traveled to England, where she requested an audience with Queen Elizabeth I to discuss the release of her son and the seizure of her lands. In addition, she challenged Gaelic law that denied her income from her husband's land and demanded that she receive appropriate recompense. She argued that the tumult reigning in Connacht had compelled her to "take arms and by force to maintain [my]self and [my] people by sea and land the space of forty years past." Bingham urged the queen to refuse the audience, claiming that Grace was "nurse to all rebellions in the province for 40 years," but Elizabeth ignored his entreaties. Perhaps the monarch was intrigued by this remarkable woman, because Grace's request was granted, and the two women met in September 1593.

A Meeting With the Queen

An 18th-century depiction of the meeting between Grace O'Malley and Elizabeth I

Grace's Greenwich Palace summit with the queen has become legendary. She supposedly wouldn't bow to Elizabeth, whom she didn't recognize as the Queen of Ireland. Though dressed in a magnificent gown that befit her status, she also carried a dagger, which she refused to relinquish. The queen, however, was happy to receive her visitor—dagger and all. The summit was conducted in Latin, supposedly the only tongue the two women shared. Ignoring the fact that they were virtually the same age, Elizabeth decided that there was only "pity to be had of this aged woman" whom she believed "will fight in our quarrel with all the world."

By the end of the long meeting, an agreement had been reached. Bingham would be instructed to return Grace's lands, pay her the funds she had demanded, and free her son. In return, Grace would withdraw her support of the Irish rebellion and attack only England's enemies.

Yet the victory was short-lived. Though her son was freed, Bingham's censure was brief, and Grace received back none of the territory she had lost. Grace was furious, and she soon withdrew from public life.

The last years of Grace O’Malley are shrouded in mystery. It’s believed that she died at Rockfleet Castle around 1603—the same year as Queen Elizabeth I. Her memory lives on, not least in the Irish ballads, which remember her with these verses:

In the wild grandeur of her mien erect and high Before the English Queen she dauntless stood And none her bearing there could scorn as rude She seemed well used to power, as one that hath Dominion over men of savage moodAnd dared the tempest in its midnight wrathAnd thro' opposing billows cleft her fearless path.

Zora Neale Hurston, Genius of the Harlem Renaissance

Twentieth century African-American author Zora Neale Hurston is best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. But her perseverance and love of her culture made for a much richer life than many people know.

Near the turn of the century, Hurston was born the spirited daughter of former slaves. Her parents had gone on to become a schoolteacher and a Baptist preacher. Her father's sermons were likely what sparked the girl's fascination with storytelling, which she'd later use not only in her works, but also in the construction of her public persona.

Over the course of her life, Hurston offered contradictory dates of birth. And in her 1942 autobiographyDust Tracks on a Road, she inaccurately claimed Eatonville, Florida, as her birthplace, when in truth she was born in Notasulga, Alabama, probably on January 7, 1891. But Eatonville was her home from aboutage 3 to 13, and a major influence on her work. One of the first places in the United States to be incorporated as an all-black town, it was also home to a vibrant and proud African-American community that protected the young Hurston from the cruel racial prejudices found elsewhere in the United States. Years later, Hurston would cherish this place and the self-confidence it instilled in her works. She once described it as "A city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools and no jailhouse."

Despite a seemingly ideal hometown, Hurston knew hardship. At 13, she lost her mother, and was booted out of boarding school when her father and new step-mom failed to foot the tuition bill. Down but not out, Hurston found work as a maid, serving an actress in a traveling theatrical company that gave her a taste of the world beyond Florida. In Baltimore, she lopped a decade off her age (a subtraction she maintained the rest of her days) to qualify for free public schooling that would allow her to complete her long-delayed high school education. From there, she worked her way through college, studied anthropology and folklore, and had her earliest works published in her school's paper. By 1920, the 29-year-old earned an associate degree from Howard University in Washington D.C. Five years later, she made the fateful move to New York City, where she eventually graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology from Barnard College after studying with the pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas. There, she also became a seminal and controversial icon of the Harlem Renaissance.

It's said that Hurston—with her brazen wit, affable humor, and charm—waltzed into the Harlem scene, easily befriending actress Ethel Waters, and poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Professor and fellow folklorist Sterling Brown once remarked of her appeal, "When Zora was there, she was the party."

Electrified by the thriving literary movement that strove to define the contemporary African-American experience, Hurston penned the personal essay "How It Feels To Be Colored Me," where she boldly declared:

"I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."

She and Hughes teamed up in 1930 to create a play for African-American actors that wouldn't use racial stereotypes. Regrettably, creative differences led to a falling out between the two that sunk TheMule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life In Three Acts before the Eatonville-set fable managed to be produced. But Hurston rebounded with her musical The Great Day, which premiered on Broadway January 10, 1932. Next, came her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, in 1934. The following year saw the release of a meticulously curated collection of African American oral folklore. Mules and Men became the greatest success she'd see in her lifetime, and yet it earned Hurston only $943.75.

Her next book, 1937’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, was written during her anthropological expedition to Haiti to study voodoo. Reflecting its divorced author's life, it followed a forty-something African American woman's journey through three marriages and self-acceptance. While the mainstream press praised Hurston's anthropological eye and her writing "with her head as with her heart," she faced a backlash from some of her Harlem Renaissance peers.

As the movement evolved, Harlem Renaissance writers had been debating how African-Americans should present their people and culture in their art. Should they devotedly fight against the negative stereotypes long established by Caucasian writers? Should their work be penned as progressive propaganda intended to expose the racism of modern America as a means to provoke change? Or should African-Americans create without the constraints of a political or creative ideology? Hurston sided with the last group, and saw her novel criticized for its embrace of the vernacular of the black South, its exploration of female sexuality, and its absence of an overt political agenda. Literary critic Ralph Ellison called Their Eyes Were Watching God a "blight of calculated burlesque," while essayist Richard Wright jeered, "Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatsoever to move in the direction of serious fiction." But fiction wasn't all she wrote.

In 1938, Hurston published the anthropological study Tell My Horse; her aforementioned autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, came six years later. But following the release of her final novel Seraph on the Suwanee, Hurston's career fell into decline. Through the 1950s, she occasionally managed to secure some work as a journalist, scraping by with stints as a substitute teacher and sometimes maid. Despite a prolific output that included four novels, two folklore collections, an autobiography, and a wealth of short stories, essays, articles and plays, Hurston died penniless and alone in a welfare home on January 28, 1960; her body—dressed in a pink dressing gown and fuzzy slippers—was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce.

It was an especially cruel fate because she'd once appealed to activist W.E.B. Du Bois to create "a cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead" to assure that they'd never be discarded. Her rejected proposal read in part: "Let no Negro celebrity, no matter what financial condition they might be in at death, lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness. We must assume the responsibility of their graves being known and honored."

This confident and rebellious creator's contribution to the Harlem Renaissance seemed certain to have doomed her to the realm of the forgotten. But in 1975, Alice Walker, who would go on to write the heralded novel The Color Purple, penned a legacy-shifting essay for Ms. magazine called "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston." The essay encouraged a new generation of readers to rediscover Hurston’s work. Their Eyes Were Watching God found a new life, and began popping up on school reading curriculums and earning reprintings in other languages, as did her other books. Mule Bonewas finally published and staged in 1991. Historians scoured archives and uncovered a never-published manuscript of folklore Hurston had collected. Titled Every Tongue Got To Confess, it was published posthumously in 2001.

Not only were Hurston's works at long last given their due—so was she. In honor of the author who'd inspired her and countless others, Walker traveled to Florida to put a proper tombstone on Hurston's grave. It reads: "Zora Neale Hurston, A Genius of the South. Novelist, folklorist, anthropologist."